Your name is DAMARA MEGIDO, the WITCH OF TIME, and you hate the world including yourself especially yourself. You hate the way the Thief of Life stole yours, relentlessly taunting you about your lost love, you hate the Page of Void for stealing your love, you hate the Doctor for turning you into this person, and most of all you hate Rufioh Nitram for leaving you, for abandoning you the second he met someone else who could be construed as more attractive than you, the second he gave up using you as a playing so he could move on to better horizons. .
. . Yet despite all of that, you can't keep yourself from loving him but you know he'll never be yours because the omnipotent Doctor lets you know that every day and Meenah Peixes lets you know that every day and the sight of that horse-fucking Horuss Zahhak makes you want to fly into hideous rage. But wait, the Doctor tells you. Wait, and you will have your revenge.
Damara doesn't want revenge, but the Doctor plants the seeds in her think pan, tends to them and lets them thrive, acting the closest thing to a moirail she has ever had, showing her sympathy even after she paralysed Rufioh in a fit of anger and horror, with some nudging along by the Doctor himself. After that, no one spoke to her. They were too afraid to. They should be afraid she told herself, glowing with her new power.
"The fuck you doin'?" the Thief called, running up to her as Damara stared down at Rufioh's body, her eyes listless, careless. She didn't answer, her brain trying to lock the Thief out. All she wanted was to be left alone now, even from the Doctor. But that wouldn't happen it couldn't happen and she knew it and she was expecting the Theif to push her aside and challenge her to a duel. And Meenah did exactly that.
"Fine," Damara said, stepping away from the Thief. She took out her needlekind from her strife specibus and watched as the Thief did the same with her 2x3dentkind. The Heiress was going to try to end her, was that it? Unfortunately Damara had powers far beyond what the Thief could do with her 2x3dentkind and she doubted the Thief had ever bothered to alchemise the 2x3dent to the point that Damara had alchemised her needles.
The Thief lunged at her with the 2x3dent but Damara was fast, faster than she had ever been and she jumped up levitating and sent a blast towards the Thief, a red hot dark beam to let the Thief know that royalty did not mean that the Thief had any right to treat her so. She walked up to the Thief's body, kicking it to turn it on its back. Still breath, though very little. She put a boot down on the Thief's ribs and as the resulting crunch sounded Damara felt a surge of glee go through her body. She blasted the Thief one last time, making sure she was really dead. Her work, her beautiful work, all done by her. She couldn't shake the feeling that something was. . Off, though, and she didn't like it. She began to feel uncomfortable, and absconded.
By the time she made it back to her planet, she had a message from the Doctor. She highlighted his words, unable to read the white against white background.
Good job.
AA: I don't understand.
What could you possibly be misunderstanding?
AA: I should feel happy that I killed them. I should feel complete. But all I feel is hollow.
AA: I don't understand.
Generally, people feel that way after killing their friends.
AA: They weren't my friends! You told me that yourself!
AA: They lied to be, betrayed me, ridiculed me!
That's true. But perhaps you actually cared for them.
AA: I don't want to care for them. I want them all to leave me alone.
You can't stay in seclusion forever, Damara.
AA: I can if I fucking want to!
You still owe me for helping you, if you haven't forgotten. This debt hasn't been filled.
AA: Fine. What do you want?
Some help. And it might even help you through catharsis.
The Doctor tells her his plans some of them at least she knows he has millions in his mind that he won't tell her but that's okay. He tells her these will make her feel better. He tells her catharsis is the best way to treat depression. Damara doesn't know what depression is, and he tells her it's when you're sad for no reason. Damara isn't sad for no reason, though, but the Doctor just waves it off.
He tells her how she can sabotage their session, how to make it so they're stuck in a dead session for eternity until they have to come to her, come begging for her to cause the Scratch. And Damara feels she might like that, might like it if people have to come for her to help, if people will be forced to be nice to her for once and not treat her like lowblood scum.
When your only friend is a man who writes in white text that you have never met, things get lonely.
.
.
The Scratch happens. The Doctor had shown her how to reach God Tier aeons before, so she is there, in her regalia, like everyone else. But she is also prepared to die. Rufioh and the Page are still together. Even Aranea, the troll no one likes, has a matesprit. She's prepared to end her god forsaken life where she's hated and looked down upon with no one to understand but a manipulative Doctor. And so she's smiling, smiles as they scratch, because it means no more pain or suffering.
Boom.
They're all blown up suddenly, just as the scratch ends, and Damara has no idea what is going on. They're beyond the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors and Damara watches, fascinated by the Gods. She had been a Derse dreamer and had seen them before, but to be near them was another thing entirely.
They weren't sure what to do or where to go. There were no dream bubbles, not then. All they could do was look down on their alternate selves and descendants and watch them grow, to become trolls in their own right.
All Damara could do was watch the Handmaid. Who she would have wanted to be, working for the Doctor. But in terms of everything, the way he treated her. . It gave her shivers. It caused the wet salty tears she had to hide to fall down her cheeks. She hadn't wanted that. She hadn't been expecting that. She didn't want to be part of some force of evil.
She just wanted people to understand her.
But people never would, she decided, and surrounded herself with scrolls of East Beforian language, speaking exclusively in that. They hadn't understood her in life and like hell she would allow them to understand her in death. They had never tried. They had never cared. She loathed them, loathed their quadrants and their matespritships and their moiraildoms and their kismesistudes.
She hit on the people she hated the most, those filthy high bloods, holding the idea that bucket-filling with a filthy low blood like her would drive them off. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.
Someday, though. Someday they would end, by her influence or not. And she knew that she would not feel the sadness she had felt the day she killed Meenah Peixes in her heart.